The Internet provides access to a wide variety of content. For instance, images, audio, video, and web pages for many different topics are accessible through the Internet. The accessible content provides an opportunity to present advertisements to users. Advertisements can be placed within content, such as a web page, image or video, or the content can trigger the display of one or more advertisements, such as presenting an advertisement in an advertisement slot within the content and/or in an advertisement slot of a pop-up window or other overlay.
Advertisers decide which ads are displayed within particular types of content using various advertising management, or analytics, tools. These tools also allow an advertiser to track the performance of various advertisements (ads or ad groups) or advertising campaigns (ad campaigns). The parameters used to determine when to display a particular ad can also be changed using advertising management tools.
The data that is used to generate the performance measures for the advertiser generally includes all data that is available. This data usually includes a combination of data from multiple servers. The combined data is large enough that performance measures generated from the data are needed to provide an efficient way of understanding the data. The data, therefore, must be processed. Processing of the data to generate useful and accurate performance measures involves a number of obstacles. For instance, if a performance measure is based upon a user's actions over a period of time, a cookie can be used to track a user's actions over a period of time. If this cookie is removed during the period of time, the data will not contain an accurate account of the user's actions during a period of time.
Also, when an advertiser provides a bid and a budget for an advertisement in an Ad Group or an Ad Campaign that the advertiser wants seen on the Internet by way of a publisher's web sites, it would be desirable to provide the advertiser with information to allow the advertiser to readily determine if the bid and budget associated with the advertisement were appropriate to reach the number of users that the advertiser would like to reach.